The Synthesis of Yoga - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Chapter II
The Integral Perfection
ADIVINE perfection of the human being is our aim. We
must know then first what are the essential elements
that constitute man’s total perfection; secondly, what we
mean by a divine as distinguished from a human perfection of
our being. That man as a being is capable of self-development
and of some approach at least to an ideal standard of perfection
which his mind is able to conceive, fix before it and pursue,
is common ground to all thinking humanity, though it may be
only the minority who concern themselves with this possibility
as providing the one most important aim of life. But by some the
ideal is conceived as a mundane change, by others as a religious
conversion.
The mundane perfection is sometimes conceived of as something
outward, social, a thing of action, a more rational dealing
with our fellow-men and our environment, a better and more
efficient citizenship and discharge of duties, a better, richer,
kindlier and happier way of living, with a more just and more
harmonious associated enjoyment of the opportunities of existence.
By others again a more inner and subjective ideal is
cherished, a clarifying and raising of the intelligence, will and
reason, a heightening and ordering of power and capacity in
the nature, a nobler ethical, a richer aesthetic, a finer emotional,
a much healthier and better-governed vital and physical being.
Sometimes one element is stressed, almost to the exclusion of
the rest; sometimes, in wider and more well-balanced minds, the
whole harmony is envisaged as a total perfection. A change of
education and social institutions is the outward means adopted
or an inner self-training and development is preferred as the true
instrumentation. Or the two aims may be clearly united, the perfection
of the inner individual, the perfection of the outer living.
But the mundane aim takes for its field the present life